As you have seen, if you hide a slide in Captivate, it's not like hiding one in PowerPoint. Hidden slides aren't produced in the Captivate output, so you cannot jump to them.

If you want a slide available in Captivate but only seen by a jump, you will need to use Variables and Advanced Actions to prevent the user from casually browsing to the slide. Upon attempting to enter the slide, an Advanced Action would check the variable to see if entering is allowed. If so, the slide is viewed. If not, a different slide is presented.

I'm not a programmer either, but Advanced actions and variables are not the 'real stuff', lot easier to handle but also less powerful. My blog is dedicated mostly to those advanced actions.

If you could explain bit more detailed, or confirm what I understood from your post, I'll try to explain step by step:

If the user is on slide 1, but doesn't click the button, he has to be navigated to slide 3

if the user is on slide 1, but does click a button, he has to be navigated to slide 2

if the user gets to slide 2 because of the button, afterwards he continues to slide 3

You will have to turn off the playbar, because the Next button on the playbar will always go to the physically next slide. To achieve this, use the On Enter action for slide 1 and Assign the value 0 to the system variable cpCmndShowPlaybar (that variable is available in the dropdown list after you choose Assign).

If my description is correct, you do not need advanced actions nor variables. Just this:

Set the On Exit action for the slide to 'Go to Next Slide', or to 'Continue'; this can be done in the Actions accordion of the Properties panel for that slide

I ask in jest, because in the example I cited (Where I said the store is a couple of blocks down the street and I didn't grab the hand and say "let me lead you to it") I said that one could create a variable, set the variable then create an Advanced Action to check the value of the variable and only allow entry to the slide if the variable contains a value that allows entry.

In that case I should not need to turn off the playbar, no? Because the only way I can view the slide is if the variable is set to the expected value. Any other attempt should navigate me to the slide beyond that slide.